Names and faces
Survivor contestant Jeff Varner, who outed fellow competitor Zeke Smith as transgender on Wednesday night’s episode of the CBS reality competition, has been fired from his real estate job. The Greensboro, N.C., News & Record reported that Varner was fired on Thursday from Allen Tate Realtors because he was “in the middle of a news story that we don’t want anything to do with.” On the episode, Varner made accusations of “a deception” before revealing that Smith is transgender. Varner was immediately criticized by other players. He repeatedly apologized but was voted out of the competition. Smith explained that he didn’t mention that he was transgender because he didn’t want to be known as “the trans Survivor player.”
Jake Tapper remembers it well, the way certain childhood memories remain as indelible as the deepest India ink. It was the bicentennial year, when he was an impressionable 7-year-old, and staring back at him from a glossy magazine cover was the Fonz, as rendered by the late Mad artist Jack Rickard. The moment was, the CNN anchor notes, his own seduction of the comics innocent. From then on, the young Tapper returned to Fat Jack’s comics shop in Philly to score back issues and repackaged Mad paperbacks. And “from that date through my adulthood, Mad magazine has been poisoning my mind with its rudeness, disrespect and unadulterated nonsense,” Tapper writes in the foreword to the magazine’s forthcoming parody book, Mad About Trump, which is due out in June. Mad, however, has not only turned over an introductory page to the host of The Lead. Its editors are also enabling the mind they long ago poisoned by publishing new, original art by Tapper — who, well before sketching on air, drew the comic strip “Static Cling” for the Dartmouth before graduating in 1991. “Trump is most fun to draw — just a great mash of caricature-able features, from bouffant to eyebrows and scowl, to the high cheekbones and the regal pride,” Tapper says. And “Wolf [Blitzer] has such iconic features he wasn’t all that tough — which also made it easy to ‘Blitzerize’ Alfred E. Neuman.” By contrast, he says, “It’s tough for me to draw myself — usually way too self-critical. I made myself look like the oldest person in the drawing.”